A blog by Luke Akehurst about politics, elections, and the Labour Party - With subtitles for the Hard of Left.
Just for the record: all the views expressed here are entirely personal and do not necessarily represent the positions of any organisations I am a member of.

Monday, April 21, 2008

The London election

Down my way, things are looking good for Labour on 1 May.

The campaign being run by the London Labour Party is stretching us to the limit of our organisational capacity, but that's a good thing - the political equivalent of chucking the kitchen sink at it is now going on.

At the very start of the campaign I encountered a bit of Evening Standard-generated anti-Ken feeling amongst middle class voters, but now people seemed to have woken up to the threat from Mr Johnson and recent canvassing sessions I've led in different bits of Hackney North & Stoke Newington have shown uniformly strong support on both estates and owner-occupied streets. It seems to be easy to get people to put posters up and this is the first election I've ever been in when a voter was so pleased to see the Labour Party come round that they hugged me.

The Tories certainly aren't being slouches - they had a team of a dozen people out in De Beauvoir this weekend, a ward they used to hold in the '90s.

The Lib Dems don't seem to have ventured beyond the ward where their agent lives, and Green activity seems a lot less than in municipal elections (though I think their councillor said something about getting leaflets delivered commercially). Left List (i.e. SWP) are leafleting heavily, and the other bit of Respect, in the person of George Galloway, interrupted my trip to the fishmongers in Stoke Newington High Street by driving past up the A10 shouting in an open top bus in the rain.

However, Hackney isn't Bexley or Bromley or Havering, and I'm conscious that big decisions that could make life a bit more difficult for residents here in the inner city are just as influenced by voters out there in suburbia.

What are other people finding on the doorstep in other parts of London?

5 Comments:

I've not really detected that much enthusiasm in general to be honest. Have seen very few Tories (though living in zone 3 east London you don't get many round here anyway) and no Boris posters or leaflets. Surprisingly little from the Lib Dems also. Got sworn at a couple of times the other day (one aimed at Livingstone personally, one a rant about tax stuff with which it's quite hard to quibble at the moment).

It's hard to call - we no longer live in an age when elections are fought amid a flurry of leaflets and window posters so it's hard to read a lot into things. Being a leftie I'm an instinctive pessimist, but I think we can and should swing this round.

Here in Hornsey & Wood Green, we've had an enthusisatic chap with a Backing Boris t-shirt deliver leaflets twice in the past fortnight. Lynne Featherstone put out a leaflet last week with a tabloid style "Shame" headline attacking Ken and the MP for Henley for not condemning China over Tibet.Not many window posters, I've seen a few here and there but the only ones I have seen are Labour.There was also a well-attended hustings organised by the Wards Corner Community Coalition in Tottenham that had reps from most parties. Joanne McCartney for Labour had to leave early for another meeting so I would have to say that probably Simon Hughes for the Libs and Lynsey German were the best speakers but Murad Qureshi, who arrived late on, was also good.

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About Me

Labour Party activist since 1988 - firmly on the moderate wing of the party. Member of Labour’s NEC 2010-2012. National Secretary of Labour Students 1995-6. Parliamentary candidate for Aldershot (2001) and Castle Point (2005). Hackney Councillor (Chatham Ward) 2002-2014, Labour Group Chief Whip 2002-09, Chair of Health Scrutiny 2010-2014. Supporter of Europe, NATO/nuclear deterrence, Israel, electoral reform. Guardian reader. Dad. Oxford resident. Unite union member. Employment history as a Labour Party Organiser, Local Government Political Assistant, Director at a Public Affairs company. All views expressed in a personal capacity. The rest will become evident from reading the blog.